Education is about raising awareness

I’m reading a fascinating book — Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover. She just used a word that unpacks the meaning of education — awareness. Education makes us aware of things we did not know before.

“I had started on a path of awareness,” she writes. And this new awareness caused her to “perceive something elemental about my brother, my father, myself.”

Her brother had been calling her the N- word, even though she was white. Previously she had not been fully aware of the truth about slavery and discrimination, but college had begun opening her eyes.

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant.”

Note “ignorant,” not unintelligent. Her family had remained unknowing of certain true things.

“I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others–because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.” (p.180)

This is why education is so important; it makes us aware of things we do not know. And our ignorance is affecting how we live our lives. Education gets us out of our prejudices, whether they be racial or whatever.